To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

Resumen del libro

In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings WWI to life as never before, focusing on the long-ignored moral drama of its critics, alongside its generals and heroes. A brilliant new history of the Great War that raises the eternal question of why such a terrible war was ever fought.

World War I stands as one of history's most senseless spasms of carnage. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war's critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain's leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain's most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other.
Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the "war to end all wars." Can we ever avoid repeating history?

Biografía del autor

Adam Hochschild (Nueva York, 1942) vive en San Francisco y ejerce la docencia como profesor de redacción en la Graduate School of Journalism de la Universidad de California en Berkeley, y durante el curso 1997-1998 fue profesor Fulbright en India. Ha colaborado en varias revistas norteamericanas, entre las que destacan The New Yorker,The New York Review of Books y The New York Times Magazine. Le concedieron el premio de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes y las Letras y fue finalista del National Book Critics Circle Award. También es autor de Half the way home: A memoir of father and son, The mirror at midnight: A South African journey, The unquiet ghost: Russians remember Stalin, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, portraits, travels, entre otros.